High performance SOAP processing driven by data mapping template

Abstract

Web Services, with loosely-coupled, high-interoperable and platform-independent characteristics, is gaining popularity in distributed computing. However, web services suffers performance penalty because its protocol stack is based on XML. SOAP is used to specify wire message format in web services, and SOAP processing largely affects the performance of web services. In this paper, we firstly analyze the performance of web services on Java platform, and identify that data model mapping between XML data and Java data is the main impact factor on performance. Therefore, we propose a new scheme of data model mapping "Dynamic Early Binding" which enables to improve SOAP processing by avoiding Java reflection operations and proactively generating processing codes. This dynamic early binding is realized by Data Mapping Template (DMT), which is specified by extended context free grammar and implemented by pushdown automaton with output. We introduce the technique into our developed SOAP engine - SOAPExpress. The effectiveness is illustrated by yielding over 100% speedups compared to Apache Axis 1.2 in our benchmark. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.